John Wayne Gacy, Jr
by electric caterpillar
Summary: Dahlia/Terry, in that order, warnings for abuse of a mentally disabled person, violent and sexual imagery


themes: religion, beauty and beauty as evil, power reversal, pizza time

youtube dot com slash watch ?v= otx49Ko3fxw

^ the song the story is named for. it's very pretty.

* * *

On the silent street in the frosted morning twinkling with dew frozen into diamond dust and foo lights floating in the dense December mist, Terry discovered a strange small apparition, dithering as if dreaming at the hem of the concrete in the shadow of the glass city sky and sleeping atmosphere and his own goliath girth.

She wore a halo, an aura of summery softness and sweetness sunshine-bright in the cold blue air. She was slight and soft and smelled delicious, like milk and mint and new pink rose petals, with dewdrop sparkles in her large soft dark eyes and willowy white limbs shuffling shyly under the hem and sleeves of her virgin white lace gown. She moved tripping upon glass tiptoes as if over clovers and daisy tops. She touched her own giggling exhalations timidly with her fingertips, threads slipping from the bright braids that contained her kind white mantle around her astonishingly narrow neck.

A monster of desire lived in Terry for this creature, woman-shaped, but so small. Like a doll.

Her wonderful hair tumbled all over the sweet winglet of her shoulder as she peeked around to light upon his towering fumbling form, the flower contemplating the monolith, and slowly, miraculously, up from the earth she cast her smile.

His blood, his brain, suspended in brightness in tribute for ever.

Together and quite alone they stood, the cherry hair fairy standing less than half the golem's height under cover of the tiny terrarium bus stop spotted with frost, for all time it seemed to Terry he looked and looked and looked down from his citadel of banal ugly fool upon this brilliant mystery, this annunciation.

The disfigured silver serpent of the commuter route approached the platform, clicking suspended from its web and clumsily and with more courage than he ever expected to possess, Terry offered the minuscule exquisite creature his arm.

She accepted with dainty surprise diffusing into gratitude and accompanied Terry, confined in an inside paradise, "with skies the color of hell-flames," into the stomach of Tiamat, and Terry departed his life.

In that city, in that species, Terry knew he was regarded with bitter pity at best - laborer, mulatto, retard. Terry believed the astronomical unlikelihood of her beauty made her unable to devise ugliness. Terry felt that looking upon him, she could see his gentleness, his compassion, his essential goodness, his secret beauty.

Her life, she had told him, was cold and bad, knees jostling together on the tram, hers white and round and elf-like in their nakedness and startling smallness, and his broad as her entire body, sturdy, sure, dressed darkly. She did not have a father. She did not know her mother. She lived with strangers. Her sister was competition to her. She was alone, adrift on planet earth, unknowable.

His bicep cooked where her ludicrous fingers, so small, so small, had held him. He could smell the beautiful hair. She was like a confection, a mouthful of sugar posy.

"Do you have boyfriend?" he forced out, bumbled, too quietly, and became the color of her beautiful hair with shame at his impediment.

She smiled tolerantly, brilliantly, not understanding, rocked gently against the bright cold zoetrope of the window as they passed into the wood, uncanny in the washed smell and motor song, and he could not collect his valor to ask again.

But she was kind - angelically - to him.

She smiled constantly, reassuringly. She answered his gulped questions diplomatically. She tumbled into his huge hard hip upon sharp turns, giggling abashed, entirely unafraid of him.

Her breasts were new and small, moving beneath the petals of white lace bodice, exquisitely powder pink somewhere inside.

Terry wanted to see them, touch them, lay the beckoning tip between his teeth.

"Excuse me, please," the doll asked him, beaming at him and ringing the bell to request her stop. Their mount mumbled still at the earthen port in a cathedral of verdant wood. Terry wanted to cry.

"Don't go," he stuttered.

"Goodbye," she said, and disappeared, holding her skirts over her swan-shaped ankle, into the trellis of cerulean fern and the brilliant mist.

* * *

Time floated away from him, his waking hours a dandelion passed over by the breath of the doll in the wood, cutting bars, carting plaster, sawing, caulking, being scolded, being mocked, being quiet, nodding and nodding and nodding, but held like a secret sweet between his tongue and the top of his skull was the slight soft shape of ludicrously long eyelashes, sketches of lovely hair curling around venus comb ears, minuscule mewing giggles and maneuvering knees.

Striking a nail into a plank he considered the smooth round cool weight of the handle. He calculated it to be the same weight and width of the doll's entire torso. When he split his thumb in his reverie the burst of shocking red so similar to the sweet-smelling braids compelled him to tears.

She had gone into the forest, gone home to the lily of the valley and fairy ring she no doubt resided in. When would he see her again? How could he see her? Hear my soul speak; the very instant that I saw you, did my heart fly to your service.

In the blue plastic restroom stall surrounded by dreadful smells and the dust and noise of the construction project Terry masturbated and sucked his thumb dry and cried and cried and cried and cried and cried until the foreman pounded the door and barked at him to get back to work.

* * *

The next morning he left home in the dark, bundled against the stone still cold and subsisting on the inferno kindled within. He asked the yawning florist for a bouquet to make a teenage angel love him.

Tulips, odorless, palsied, unlovely. Orchids? Bizarre. Daisies? Plain. Dahlias, then? The clusters of bright blushing flutes, the resilient tender texture of the womb, was strangely appetizing to him.

Roses, white as her flesh and pink as her mouth and red as her red, red hair, attended by white lilies and fluffs of baby's breath and contrived curls of leaves dressed in artificial crystal dewdrops, very suitable, very suitable.

The florist charged Terry much too much and laughed unkindly behind his back as he departed, aglow with anticipation.

He stood at the stop for a long time, bearing the flower bouquet the color of their future child.

He stood as the sun somewhere out of reach of the broth of fog and cold black clouds passed over the rim of the horizon, almost penetrating the dream of the world.

He stood as the first strains of commerce stirred in the bowels of the city, the sound and sulfurous fumes of vehicles uncoiling from the earth.

He stood as his transfer arrived, looked at him in extreme exasperation for several seconds before departing without him.

He stood as the morning route came for him, again, and again, and again, eleven times he waved the disinterested driver along.

Not one person appeared.

At noon, he retired the tiring bouquet in the garbage bin and began the hike to work.

* * *

He dressed her like a statue of Isis, enshrined in his mind, becoming more beautiful, more wonderful, lighter, softer, the brightness of her hair too intense to tolerate, the female fragrance sufficient to lay him to sleep as if on a bed of poppies.

His devotion displaced whatever religion remained in him.

Every day he bought her flowers, begonias, columbine, birds of paradise, the more alien to climate and expensive the better, and carried them every day until they soddened past recognition, considering them laid at her altar.

He bought her candies; assorted truffles in a valentine-shaped box, caramels in a cellophane bouquet, marzipan wrought in the forms of whimsical miniature fruits and flowers and birds. None of them he knew the name of. None of them he ever tasted. He would have bought her diamonds if the lady clerk hadn't shooed him out the door, and if the jeweler happened to be a blessedly trusting soul regarding credit.

He bought her bears and doe-eyed dolls. He bought her dresses. They accumulated in the overgrown corners of his state-issued apartment with the days and disappointments.

As expectant days matured into weeks, he became accustomed to several varieties of hunger.

He thought he saw her fleetingly in the sickly lit abandoned stairwell of his apartment complex, a few brilliant red hairs passing around a corner, splayed on the decayed pavement in the alley he trespassed on his way home at night, passing in a flash illuminated in the window of the train like a television screen.

Loyally he would vault flights, shift dumpsters, overturn paper palaces and be berated by beggars, and chase midnight trains down the tracks from stop to stop to stop trailing steam from his mouth like a caboose.

Still, she shyed from him.

And every night, cowering in the malodorous blankets heaped in his sleeping area, he succumbed to the fever of his monstrous want, and every night, without fail, as was his custom every night since his mother succumbed to the cancer in the stomach he once inhabited, since his father lessened by dementia bestowed upon him the household pistol, he disassembled and polished and reassembled and considered the overlarge ugly object which perfectly reflected himself, in the palm of his hand, nestled in his genitals, kissing the dewy cup of his soft pallet.

He loved her, how he loved her, more than he ever imagined he was capable of loving another earthly creature. He should have loved God like he loved that little girl.

Exactly one month later, carrying a corsage of cunt-colored carnations and a slice of soft white cake described to him as ambrosia to little girls everywhere, he met at the stop on the hill in the mute white mist the ghost of a doll.


End file.
